Rodney Falconer and Urs Walterlin are part of a community group helping to restore a wetland at Goulburn on the southern tablelands, in New South Wales, and they've given it free wifi.

Lucy Barbour

A group of volunteers restoring a wetland at Goulburn, on the New South Wales southern tablelands, have given the site a very modern touch - wifi.

Free internet is provided through a small solar panel and battery system, set up on a bird hide by the water.

It's part of a community-driven project by the Goulburn Group, which has given the town 10 free wifi spots in the last few years.

Volunteer Rodney Falconer says having wifi in the wetlands will attract more people to the region.

"And while they're here we can do all sorts of subversive things to them like educate them, get them to appreciate the environment, get them to think, 'hey, this is a really nice town'," he said.

"And then as they look around, they can see all the stuff around us was made by the community. It wasn't done by some wealthy guy giving us loads and loads of money, it was Goulburn people doing stuff."

The Goulburn Group was established about five years ago and its volunteer members work on sustainable economic, social and environmental developments for the region.

Urs Walterlin is the group's chairman and he says it's taken a lot of hard work to get to this stage.

"First you need partners, you need the businesses. They have to host these units," he said.

"It doesn't cost them actually anything except maybe 10 cents a year of power, but first they have to agree, they have to trust you.

"But the Goulburn Group has now done many many good projects and so these businesses who agree to be part of this Goulburn free wifi network, they say, 'ok, we give them a go because they've done good things before'."

Goulburn's free community wifi network, and the fact that it's available in a wetland, has attracted the attention of Australian scientists.

Doctor Ian McShane, a senior research fellow from the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT in Melbourne, thinks this is the first time that community-driven free wifi has been set up in Australia.

"Well, Goulburn's a national leader in terms of community wifi development, bottom up broadband, as it's sometimes referred to," he said.

"We're doing a research project on public wifi in Australia and Australia is probably about 10 years behind other parts of the world in public wifi rollouts.

"And interestingly enough, although most of the publicity in the last three of four months or so has been around the capital city rollouts of wifi in the CBDs, most of the interesting stuff is really happening in regional Australia."